The Irenaean Theodicy: Was The World Really Made Perfect?

To western religions, Augustine’s theodicy serves to highlight God as both loving and fair or just. God does not intervene to prevent evil, but rather through the death of Jesus, eternal life is available to those who accept him. However, was the world really made perfect? Augustine’s views by western standards are at odds with natural science. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution proves that nature is anything but perfectly designed, rather humans have risen away from their primal instinct and developed into the creatures they are today. Furthermore, Friedrich Schleiermacher states a perfect world going wrong is a logical contradiction, either the world wasn’t perfect, to begin with, or God enabled it to go wrong. Likewise, if we were to consider
Irenaeus, states that the world is the best of all possible worlds. As humans are not made perfect but rather with the potential to become perfect, because it allows humans to fully develop as human creation is incomplete without the experience of evil and suffering. Notably in Genesis 1:26, “let us make mankind in our image in our likeness”, it is inferred that humans are created in the image of God, an intelligent conscious being with a moral nature, and must grow into the likeness of God, developing a moral nature to be like God. All things considered, Irenaeus believed that morality developed through hard work and free will is more valuable than pre-programmed or readymade morality. That is to say, Irenaeus, unlike Augustine, did not think humans nor the world was made perfect. “A world without problems, difficulties, perils, and hardships would be morally static. For moral and spiritual growth comes through response to challenges, and in a paradise, there would be no challenges”, (Irenaeus, Unger & Steenberg, 2012). Richard Swinburne developed the idea that there are certain ‘higher’ goods God wants for us and that some of these goods not only logically preclude the existence of other goods but require the existence of
Without death a person cannot make the ultimate sacrifice, having a limit lifespan enables persons to focus their attention on things that matter and death limits the amount of suffering one person can have inflicted on them. The idea of having less suffering in the world while tempting, despite this, is limited to our understanding of suffering as the only relative to our own experiences. J.L Mackie, unlike Richard Swinburne, believed that instead of choosing between the two choices of; God maximizing our pleasure but minimizing our pain leading to no free will or pain and suffering existing as a price for our free will, that we could have both. J.L. Mackie assures that since God is all powerful it would be possible for genuine freedom and the minimization of pain. The value of freedom and the goods to which it contributes outweighs the disvalue of our evil choices; God may be justified in creating us even though he foresees that we will sometimes act with